This disclosure relates to crimping sleeves. More particularly, it relates to a crimping sleeve for use in small areas such as used in commercial or industrial applications. Referring to FIG. 1, an existing enclosure or tube has a small envelope E within it in which the crimp sleeve at joint J must be used to join wire W to fiber F. The small envelope must accommodate both the crimp sleeve length and the crimp sleeve travel based on pull wire travel along a longitudinal direction.
End stops for cables and wire are used throughout a multitude of industries. One of the current methods uses a standard crimp sleeve with tooling that swages material between two dies transverse to the wire.
Another method uses a knot alone or a knot with a sleeve, which is used primarily for synthetics. Another method uses a solder ball, braze or weld on an end wire, which results in high performance tensile strength. Still another method uses a potting compound in conjunction with a sleeve on the end of wire.
A common method for swaging ferrules onto tubes for sealing and splicing applications has been in use for many years. This method axially swages ferrules onto tubes using forming dies built into the coupling assembly or the valve.
However, there exists a need for high performance stop sleeves that have strength equal to strength of the cable or wire. These sleeves must also be small in size relative to the diameter of the rope with no or minimal flash from crimping. These stop sleeves must also be easy to apply and crimp. The primary industry to use these stop sleeves is the industrial or commercial industry and the materials used need to be strong and relatively inert. The sizes of the applications are very small and exacting. One existing end stop has been a solder ball. This method is process sensitive especially with inert materials such as stainless steel and Nitinol.
Given the low coefficient of friction of Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) coatings relative to commonly used ductile crimp materials such as copper and aluminum, there is a need for a crimp sleeve material which has a high coefficient of friction to PTFE and still remains ductile. Ductility is a critical feature of the sleeve material. There is also a need to provide crimp sleeve material which has a high coefficient of friction since the gripping surface area of the sleeve is limited by usable space in the enclosure. It is also important to use a high coefficient of friction material because methods of squeezing a highly ductile material such as copper to a greater degree only extrudes material outside the usable space of the enclosure. Titanium is such a material which has a high coefficient of friction and is less ductile than copper but more ductile than aluminum. Thus, there is a need to provide a crimp sleeve made of titanium.
Thus, an objective of the disclosure is to splice a Nitinol spring wire to a PTFE coated stainless steel wire. Both wires extend from the non-bullet nose end of the splice. There is no existing method for doing this. This configuration is a new method/design that replaces the existing splice method in the design.
Another objective of the disclosure is to crimp an end stop sleeve onto the end of a wire rope such as synthetic rope or stranded rope wherein the stop is to be crimped on the end. Existing methods use soldering or brazing a ball that acts as a stop onto the end of the wire. However, this does not have good process repeatability.
Thus, there is a need for new methods of splicing wire with a splice sleeve and crimping a stop sleeve onto a wire rope which overcomes the above mentioned difficulties, while providing better overall results. Still other benefits and aspects of the disclosure will become apparent upon a reading and understanding of the following detailed description.